Business Resources

Marketing Your Business

To successfully grow your business, you’ll need to attract and retain satisfied customers. Get the facts about your industry, local market, customers and competitors. With the right information, develop a strategy that identifies the steps you will take to effectively communicate with both existing and new customers.

Marketing Basics: Start with the fundamentals and a marketing plan that clearly determines how you will identify, communicate and connect with your customers.

SBA: Marketing
Done well, marketing is a great way to promote your small business. It requires an integrated approach to a variety of activities that goes beyond advertising your product. For example, the way you describe your product or service is also a form of marketing. This section is a brief overview of concepts and topics to make your marketing efforts more effective.

Advertising Your Business
Anyone can create an advertising plan, but only a few can create a cost-effective media plan that produces a good number of higher quality leads that convert into sales.

Pricing Your Products and Services
Attaching a fair and accurate price tag to your products and services can be a tricky balancing act. It should come as no surprise that many business owners have an ongoing struggle with setting their pricing strategies.

MarketingZone.com: Marketing How-to Guides
MarketingZone.com is a how-to site and community for small business on marketing with hundreds of how-to guides written by marketing experts. 

Essential Elements of a Business Plan
A business plan should be a work in progress. That's because your business will evolve over time, and be influenced by outside factors such as the economy and local conditions. Marketing sections of the plan will include Market Analysis and Marketing & Sales Management.

Mplans: Free Sample Marketing Plans
Get practical ideas and good models with dozens of examples of successful marketing plans and free marketing calculators for startup costs, breakeven, cash flow and more.

DigitalWorkTools
Get a total handle on all of your marketing initiatives and efforts with a slew of high quality professional marketing forms. You can view forms free, but there is a charge to download documents.

Business and Market Research: Do you know the current conditions and projected growth of your industry? How will you promote, price and distribute your products and services? Who are your competitors? Gathering this information helps you define your products and services, the types of customers you will target, and the competition.

Market Analysis
The market analysis section is Part 2 of the business plan. This section should illustrate your knowledge about the particular industry your business is in. To run a successful business, you need to learn all about your existing and potential customers, your competitors and the economic conditions of your marketplace.
Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing consumer and economic data to help you understand which products and services your customers want, and how to differentiate your business from your competitors.

North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
Identifying your correct NAICS code is critical to finding information on industries, customers and competitors. Although NAICS was developed to replace the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) System. Both are used by government and data information services. To find your industry code, enter a keyword that best describes your business in the search box.

HighBeam Business: Industry Reports
HighBeam Business delivers insightful snapshots of specific industries that include an industry’s classification codes, historical performance, major competitors and statistics.

Business Guides by Industry
Each guide in this section details information specific to an industry. You’re likely to find one that provides invaluable information targeted to your line of business.

TexShare Databases
The TexShare Databases turn your computer into the anytime, anywhere library. Find useful information through news articles, magazines and journals. View a list of available databases that include Business Source Complete, Regional Business News, and InfoTrac Newsstand. Full access to these databases is available online from your home or office to registered card holders of participating Texas libraries.

Gateway to Associations
The ASAE Gateway to Associations Directory is easy to use and is updated daily to help you make networking more convenient. This page allows you to search for an association by name, interest area, or geographic location. You also can search using a combination of fields.

Target Market: Do you sell your products and services to consumers, businesses or both? Who are the best customers for your products and services and where are they located?

Consumers (B2C)

Texas State Data Center: 2010 Census
The most current demographics for county, cities, and metro areas is now available. Scroll down to the section for State of Texas, County, and Place Total Population by Race/Ethnicity to download the demographic profile for any county, city (places) or metro in Texas.

Consumer Demographics
As demographic data for the 2010 census becomes available, learn more about the features and functions of the NEW American FactFinder

ESRI LIfestyles
Enter the Zip codes where your customers live and find out about the leisure activities, buying preferences, and lifestyle choices in their neighborhood.

Claritas: You Are Where You LIve
People living in the same neighborhoods tend to have similar lifestyles, proving the old adage that "birds of a feather flock together" still holds true. To a large extent, you are where you live!

Pew Social & Demographic Trends
The Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project studies behaviors and attitudes of Americans in key realms of their lives, including family, community, health, finance, work and leisure.

ReferenceUSA: Business and Residential Information
The Navarro College SBDC and each SBDC in the North Texas SBDC Networksubscribes to ReferenceUSA and provides information at no cost to our clients. This database is an excellent tool for identifying both residential and business customers and building a customized contact list. You can also identify and analyze the types of competitors, level of competition and estimate the size of a market. Knowing the competition provides valuable insights into how a company can differentiate itself from others selling similar products and services.

Businesses (B2B)

TexShare Databases
The TexShare Databases turn your computer into the anytime, anywhere library. Find useful information through news articles, magazines and journals. View a list of available databases that include Business Source Complete, Regional Business News, and InfoTrac Newsstand. Full access to these databases is available online from your home or office to registered card holders of participating Texas libraries.

EDGAR: Researching Public Companies
The SEC’s EDGAR database provides free public access to corporate information, allowing you to quickly research a company’s financial information and operations, which includes Initial Public Offerings (IPO) and 10-K annual reports. With the name of a public company, its ticker symbol or SIC code, you can use EDGAR to find SEC documents filed by public companies. A tutorial guide is available where you’ll find tips for using EDGAR and answers to frequently asked questions about researching public companies.

Manta.com
Manta offers all site visitors free access to contact information, location, and other details for more than 64 million companies. Visitors who register with Manta gain access to more detailed profiles of 13 million companies, also free of charge.

Internet and Social Marketing: You need more than just “word of mouth” to attract customers to your new business. In addition to traditional and internet advertising, social media and search engines such as Google will help you effectively communicate with new and existing customers.

Blogs and newsletters

Small Business Trends
Small Business Trends offers a variety of websites and information feeds to help you stay informed about the small business market.  You can track, explore and learn from trends affecting small business through these informational resources.

HubSpot: Marketing Resources
Access free resources that include eBooks, data, and a collection of upcoming and archived internet marketing webinars on a variety of topics, from blogging, to search engine marketing, to press releases.

eMarketer
eMarketer is the go-to authority on digital marketing, media and commerce, providing insights and intelligence essential to navigating the changing, competitive and complex digital environment.

Wordpress
Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category.

Search Engine Optimization

High Rankings Advisor
The High Rankings Advisor is an informative and witty, free email newsletter with 25,000 subscribers, written by Jill Whalen. Jill keeps no secrets when it comes to search marketing and optimizing sites for high rankings.

MarketingZone: Search Engine Optimization Guide
This how-to guide on search engine optimization (SEO) is based on our own "lessons learned" from creating, launching, tweaking and optimizing our site and web pages within it to attract as many website visitors as possible, as quickly as possible. 

Creating a Website

Homestead
With our combination of easy-to-use free website building software, affordable web hosting and toll-free customer support, Homestead makes it easy for you to build a website.

Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Joomla
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.

MarketingZone: How to Create a Website
Learn about the different options for how to create and maintain a website, along with the pros, cons, cautions, costs and realities to be successful.

Google

Google Places: Get Found on Google for Free
97% of consumers search for local businesses online. Be there when they're looking for you with Google Places for business - a free local platform from Google.

Google Analytics
Google wants you to attract more of the traffic you are looking for, and help you turn more visitors into customers. Use Google Analytics to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site. Make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions and profits.

Google Adwords Beginner’s Guide
In this guide, you'll learn all the AdWords basics, including how to begin, what to expect, and how to make the most of your advertising efforts.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
To create ads, you need to choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business.

Email Marketing

Constant Contact
Constant Contact's leading email marketing, online survey and event marketing tools—supported by its expert personal coaching and support—help all types of small businesses and organizations create professional-looking email newsletters and insightful online surveys and begin a dialogue with their customers.

Emma
Monthly newsletters, invitations, promos and more. No matter what you send, your organization's emails will stand out in style.

Social Media:

HubSpot: Social Media Marketing Hub
Comprehensive Social Media Marketing Resources-Social media can be used for more than just connecting with friends.  Use the resources on this page to learn how to use social media as a tool to help achieve your business and marketing goals. For specific resources on individual channels, check out our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Marketing Hubs.

Social Media Quickstarter
The folks at Constant Contact have created a simple collection of guides to get you building online social connections fast, in a way that's super easy.

Duct Tape Marketing: Social Media
Creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system, John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of "Duct Tape Marketing - The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide". From John’s blog, search all his posts for social media.

Mashable: Social Media
Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture. With more than 40 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new Web sites and services, and offering social media resources and guides.

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